A collaboration between The School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape Architecture and The McWhorter School of Building
Science

program focus ...

The design and construction industries in the U.S. are experiencing significant
changes in the relationship between their respective professionals and the delivery
systems they employ to help clients realize successful projects. Through a variety
of models, these formerly fragmented professions are now crafting new ways of working
together – and exploiting new collaboration technologies - to create more efficient,
economical and sustainable projects in the built environment. Historically, architecture
and construction management students have been trained in separated academic environments
that did not capitalize on opportunities to work collaboratively. The Master of
Integrated Design & Construction Program at Auburn University is designed to prepare graduates for success
in this new paradigm of integrated project
delivery, and to prepare students who will be the professionals leading
the future evolution of the design and construction industries.

The Master of Integrated Design & Construction Program at Auburn University seeks graduate students
from the design, engineering and construction disciplines who will embrace teamwork,
collaboration, and empathy between the differing roles and responsibilities of their
counterparts. The program will foster an integrated delivery of projects in the
built environment, leveraging the most current strategies in project development,
risk analysis and digital tools.

What we are talking about is integrated delivery. We have to think about this as
defining our purpose as an industry. In our academic settings we must reinvent how
we are educating our students in [an] interdisciplinary format.

The promise of Integrated Practice is vast - one can imagine having the power to
control a wide range of information related to the project, full collaboration with
a range of stakeholders, and virtual rehearsal of construction. There is an urgent
and immediate need for architectural education to prepare future practitioners who
will catalyze this change.